


what's a happy ending, anyway?

by flosculatory



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Angst, M/M, half fic half headcanon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-07
Updated: 2016-01-06
Packaged: 2018-05-12 08:18:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5659264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flosculatory/pseuds/flosculatory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two rarepair headcanon-y things, originally posted during Inceptiversary 2015.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Eames/Saito

**Author's Note:**

> So I'm not much of a writer, but I was (mostly) proud of these drabbly headcanons, so I cleaned them up (marginally) and am posting them here for Rarepair Winter. Reduce, reuse, recycle?
> 
> Oh, and warnings about POV shifts all over the place.

Post-Inception, everyone goes their separate ways, and Saito is left with fog in his head from limbo, just trying to piece his life together and figure out how a lifetime could have possibly fit into that ten hour flight. News of Fischer-Morrow’s break up comes out; the inception was successful. He wants to congratulate the team on their victory, but just ends up thinking of Eames: Eames, who basically created the whole plan on his own, Eames, who was the only one not to fuck up on the job ( _except Ariadne_ , Saito supposes, but he still doesn’t know why the hell she was there in the first place), Eames, slick and teasing, Eames, who was the only one who really blew him away when he showed off his forging abilities. 

So Saito gives him a call, offers him a few (relatively safe) jobs, and how could Eames refuse such a swanky opportunity? Soon enough, Eames is spending most of his time at an apartment that Saito pays for. He wouldn’t call himself a kept boy, necessarily: he’s free to leave as he wishes, pursue other jobs, refuse Saito when he feels like it. But more often than not, Eames _likes_ being with Saito. Sometimes he goes to work with Saito, analyzing the facial tics of his employees or other businessmen, to feed Saito info about who is full of shit. He forges works of art to gift to Saito, even though he knows that Saito could afford the real things. But Eames’ favourite part of being with Saito is that he gets to show off his _skills_. They go under every so often, and Eames puts on disguise after disguise: women, men, and those in between; business partners, family, movie characters, strangers. And Saito is never bored. Saito never takes Eames’ abilities for granted, never ceases to be amazed at how flawlessly Eames can drop his skin to become someone else. So when Eames always ends at his favourite blonde, Saito takes the opportunity to worship properly, and they have slow, lazy sex down in the dream. 

(Sometimes, up top, Eames looks longingly at Saito, but just gets a small smile and a shake of the head. But Saito never looks at him as anything less than an equal, and for now? That’s good enough for Eames.)


	2. Arthur/Nash

It’s a sad fact that no architect wants to get within spitting distance of Cobb anymore. Whispers of their reputation have spread to all the corners of the dreamshare community: taking jobs that are high-risk and low-reward, haunted by a rogue projection who feeds on the screams of team members. If Arthur were them, he’d run too. But this leaves them in the undesirable position of needing to find and shape their own architects, ones who don’t yet know better. Arthur knows a guy who knows a guy who knows Nash, a “reformed” drug addict with an imagination second to none, and who has been sniffing around dreamshare for a while. Along with this recommendation comes a few hesitant warnings of instability, which Arthur just shrugs off, because he works with Cobb for Christ’s sake.

So enter Nash. Arthur tries to remain professional, but Nash, greasy, unstable, just trying to survive, is also Nash with vivid dreams, Nash with the photographic memory, Nash who’s the first one who’s paid attention to Arthur in the past two years. So during the planning of their job (Nash’s first), they fall into bed together. At first it’s just stress relief, but eventually it’s two scared kids finding refuge from Cobb’s crazy in each other. Against all odds, the job works out fine, and Nash looks at both of them and decides to stay. And for the first time, Arthur thinks that he might survive this. He’s not in love with Nash by any stretch of the imagination, and he can only imagine what Nash thinks of him. (Nash likes Arthur’s steadiness, the first steady thing he’s had in awhile, the way that Arthur doesn’t make him feel like a complete fuck-up all of the time. He entertains thoughts of ditching the old bag by the roadside and running off with Arthur, but knows deep down that Arthur wouldn’t leave Cobb. So he stays.)

So it’s all going, and then that goddamn carpet sends it all crashing down. Nash wakes up to Arthur yelling at him for the first time, and he can’t understand what’s going on. (What Nash couldn’t know is that Arthur was just redirecting his frustration ~~at Mal~~ at Cobb: an Arthur in his right mind, an Arthur who hadn’t just been shot by his best friend, _his_ Arthur would’ve nodded and dismissed it as something that no one could have prepared for.) But Nash’s streak of feeling like a human instead of a pile of dirt, all because of Arthur, it comes to an end. He realizes that Arthur would never leave with him, not really, and it was better to give himself a new start. So as soon as they’re off the train, Nash sits by himself for an hour to weigh his decisions, decides to track Mr. Saito down, and gets beaten for his troubles. But the worst part, the very worst part, is that when Arthur saw him bleeding and broken and heard about his disloyalty, he didn’t even flinch. He barely looked at him, really. It’s like he wasn’t surprised at all, like he always knew that Nash was a fuck-up, and that this was all just returning to Arthur’s perfect cosmic order. (What Nash couldn’t know this time was that as soon as they were off the train, Arthur sat by himself for an hour to weigh his decisions, and decided to track Nash down to apologize.)

* * *

After the inception, when Arthur finally gets time to himself, he stops running that brain of his and sleeps. He sleeps and sleeps but never dreams, yet some mornings he wakes up thinking about Nash. You see, he didn’t have time to dwell on Nash’s betrayal during the job, but now he obsesses over it. Why did Nash sell them out? Was Nash always this untrustworthy? Did Nash ever care about him at all? (Naturally, it’s this question that comes around time and time again.) But because Arthur is Arthur, he starts imagining how things could have been different, torturing himself by running through all the ‘what if?’ scenarios he can think of, and it always circles back to ‘what if I _hadn’t_ snapped at Nash on the train?’ (and its associated ‘what if Cobb _hadn’t_ sent his dead wife to shoot me in the leg?’, but Arthur tries to think of Cobb as little as possible these days.) He knows that he had been unfair, and that Nash was fragile. Hell, they were both fragile, but Arthur had the hard exterior down pat, while Nash hadn’t had the time to develop his.

The natural, ‘Arthurian’ solution would be to use his contacts and various skills to just track Nash down and find out his status once and for all. But every time that he reaches towards his laptop, or his cell phone, Arthur is overwhelmed with emotions that he can’t parse, but that probably include anger and confusion at Nash, loneliness that he wishes he didn’t feel, and a form of guilt that he doesn’t quite understand. (and from being around Cobb, he knows that guilt can be extremely dangerous.) So time passes. Arthur works with new people and remembers how fun dreamshare can be when he’s not terrified of dying all the time. Wounds start to close, and he thinks of Nash less and less, just occasional flashes of ‘I wish Nash were here to see this’ or ‘even Nash could do a better job of making this dream’.

And one day, Arthur goes in to work a job with an extractor he trusts and an unfamiliar architect. (Guess who the architect is.)

* * *

epilogue: Nash, who now goes by another name (but that’s neither here nor there), dug himself out and _moved_. He figured out how to fend for himself, how to be smarter, tougher, and steadier. He made a bit of a name for himself and, most importantly, never screws a carpet up again. By all rights, he should have run into Arthur sooner, but despite his personal growth, he couldn’t quite bring himself to forgive this man, whom Nash had trusted but who had sent him in a downward spiral and nearly gotten him killed. So he avoided Arthur like the plague. But he accepts a last-minute job from one of the more reliable extractors, and who should show but Arthur? He supposes that he should feel pleased at the flicker of confusion on Arthur’s face, that half-second of not recognizing Nash at all: Nash _did_ work hard to distance himself from who he was, got regular haircuts and everything. But Nash only feels a pang of disappointment, until Arthur schools his face back to normal. _Maybe it’s easier this way_ , Nash thinks.

But Arthur _does_ remember him. The job comes and goes, and Arthur, accustomed to making the first move, invites Nash to a bar where they get well and properly trashed, and they somehow find their way back into bed together just like old times. Under cover of darkness, apologies are exchanged and misconceptions cleared. And for all that Nash is more confident these days and has developed that stability he’d admired in Arthur, being with Arthur settles something in him that he hadn’t realized was in motion. And the best part? They’re not two scared kids anymore, trapped under Cobb’s thumb. They’re not in bed together, desperately trying to hide their weaknesses in the other person. No, they’re quieter now, gentler, freer. 

(Nash hms in contemplation. Arthur rolls over and mumbles at him to stop thinking so hard and to go to fucking sleep already. Nash chuckles because he remembers saying the exact same thing to Arthur a few years ago. And then he stops thinking and goes to fucking sleep.)


End file.
